day was about to come up with the sun and problems had to be faced.
From the kitchen window she saw the dugout door open. Matt stepped out carrying a lantern in his fist with a shirt draped over his elbow.
The lantern swung with his stride, setting a circle of light swaying over the ground from the dugout to the pump in the yard.
Cruel was having to watch the man she could nearly taste on her tongue splashing water over his bare chest.
Cruel was watching him dip his hand into the bucket he had hauled up, with chest muscles pulling and stretching in the glow of the lamp. It was watching while he dumped water over his head, then shook his shoulder-kissing hair into the still inky dawn.
Cruel was asking her to leave the only home that had ever truly been hers. Making a choice like that would rip her heart in two. The very thought of it made her stomach queasy. She cared about Matt, more deeply than she had ever cared for anyone, but her four walls were her dream come true.
Without a doubt, between the two of them, Matt was the cruel one.
Emma dropped a dab of grease into the frying pan heating on the stove. She watched it pop and turn clear, spreading thinly over the black bottom of the skillet.
It might be only days until he left. She would have to hurry and make the new dress she had promised Lucy.
Or take her good time. But that would make her selfish. With death riding into town, Matt would have to go, and soon.
* * *
With a full day of chores stretched out before him, Matt stepped out of the dugout. The moon had set but stars still dotted the dark sky—the same ones that had twinkled on Emma’s bare skin the whole night long.
A coyote howled far out beyond the creek. Matt’s boots crunched the dried-out earth when he walked toward the well, but other than that, all the world slept, silent and still.
All the world but Emma, that is. He watched her through the window while he approached the well. She still had on her party dress and hadn’t yet done up her hair. Even from this distance he could see a sprig or two of grass wedged in with the curls.
She had to be mad as a pistol at him for asking her, again, to give up the thing most important to her.
Watching her move about the kitchen, turning something over in the skillet and stir something else, made his heart trip up inside him.
This was the woman most men only dreamed of. What man in town wouldn’t give his best boots to be able to stand here in the dark and watch while she opened the oven door and slid in something to be baked?
Which one of them wouldn’t give half a lifetime to be offered her body? Was he ten times over a fool not to take what she clearly wanted to give?
Matt lowered the bucket into the well and drew it up again full of fresh, morning-crisp water. He dumped some over his head, then shook it to clear out the image of Emma lying chaste but naked beside him.
He’d longed to taste her flesh when the moon had spun its magic on it. And now, again, when the heat from the stove blushed her cheeks pink.
Matt shrugged on his shirt, then tied his bandanna around his neck. He’d better feed the horses before his thoughts got the best of him. In another second he might find himself bursting through the kitchen door to take his wife right there on the table that she was cleaning with a soapy cloth.
If he had half as much sense as Red, which wasn’t much these days, he’d say goodbye tomorrow. The house was finished and there was no longer anything to hold him here.
He ought to give her a long, hard kiss farewell first thing after chores. He’d do it for sure, if Emma hadn’t promised to make Lucy a new dress.
* * *
“Mama Emma, when will you make my new dress?”
Emma lifted Lucy to the seat of the wagon, then checked to make sure Red had loaded the large bucket and the small one in the back along with four barrels of water.
“Not today. It might take most of the afternoon to get the trees watered.”
It had been ten hot days since the last rain. If she didn’t make the effort to water